1. Technical Field
This invention relates generally to the field of computing platforms. More specifically, this invention relates to a new form of a tamper resistant repository on computing platforms.
2. Description of the Related Art
Data security products provide assurance, for example, to software publishers, that a user cannot create, read, write, delete, restore, or copy license rights that are stored on the user's hardware. For example, a repository, such as a file anchor is useful because it can be used to mark an occurrence of a particular event on a system such as for instance the acquisition of a license or the completion of a transaction. Thus, a user may have motivation to tamper with the repository to (1) violate a policy that the data in the repository intends to enforce or (2) remove evidence of an activity that was logged or recorded in the repository. Because the interface to a file system is well defined it is a straight-forward task for a program to interact with a file on the file system which implements a file anchor. The problem on an operating-system is that the simplicity of file input or output (I/O) operations makes an input or output operation easy to detect by monitoring one or more system calls made by a repository-dependent program. For example, a tool can monitor the system calls and detect an input or output operation by a repository-dependent program, which can reveal the location of the corresponding file anchor, hence making the file repository vulnerable to tampering.